Raid and Gaming Performance

Introduction to Raid:

Raid which stands for Redundant Array of Independant Disks is a technology that has been used for years to enhance performance and provide fault tolerance to the server and workstation market segments. Recently Raid has become more and more commonly found in the desktop and consumer markets as the prices of controller cards and drives has dropped. This trend will likely continue as storage and competition increases to capture this growing market. For a full explanation of raid and its intended purposes see our article here. For now though understand that there are several implementations of raid which can be used but the most common are Raid 0 and Raid 1. Since this article focuses upon the performance enhancements gained by Raid we shall be using a Raid 0 array for our tests.

The Theory:

The theory behind creating a raid array to benefit gaming is that since many currently available games load a huge amount of textures and information from the hard drive into video and system memory that utilizing a raid array can lead to significantly reduced load times and lag while playing the game. The load times come into play during map and level transitions as well as during gameplay when movie sequences or transitions occur. These transitions can be very frustrating when your game pauses to load information from the hard drive into memory and you are faced with a stuck or stuttering frame while it loads.

Synthetic vs Real World Testing:

Thanks to the combined efforts of HighPoint and Samsung we are bringing you real world testing to prove or disprove the currently held opinions about Raid and gaming. First we tested the HighPoint Raid controller 3520 in an enterprise server setup to demonstrate the common uses of this equipment. We will bring you these resultgs and then show you the desktop gaming application testing.

We would like to thank each of the manufacturers for their co-operation in helping this testing happen. This is especially true of HighPoint and Samsung who each went out of their way to assist with getting us hardware for these tests.

It is important to note the performance of the Samsung drives used in testing as it will affect performance.